A number of methods have been employed in order to make various types of bread products, such as loaves, buns, rolls, biscuits and breadsticks, from a sheet of dough. In such systems, a sheet of bread dough may typically be extruded, reduced and conveyed along a dough travel path to one or more cutting apparatus, such as slitter wheels, guillotine-type cutter molds, reciprocating head cutter molds, or rotatable drum-type cutter molds. In general, such cutting techniques render a baked product having sharp edges, rather than round edges resembling a hand made product. In the past, a rounded edge product has been obtained by placing small balls of dough in rollers which roll the balls of dough into a substantially spherical shape. The dough spheres (or dough balls) are then placed in individual baking pans so that they can be baked, much as a conventional dinner roll is baked by a consumer. However, such techniques are very low throughput techniques. They are, thus, less than desirable for commercial applications in which it is imperative to process many pounds of dough per minute.
Further, it is often desirable to imprint the top of the dough pieces with a pattern such as a Kaiser pattern, a cross, a cloverleaf, etc. In the prior art, dough pieces are imprinted by stamping in a further processing step that takes place after the dough pieces are cut. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,421,947 discloses a roll forming apparatus wherein dough rolls are formed and subsequently moved to an imprinter by a conveyor. The system includes a stop gate positioned in the path of the rolls to stop the rolls in a desirable position for imprinting. Sensors are then used to detect the position of the rolls to ensure that the imprinter is aligned with the rolls. Once the rolls are imprinted, the conveyor is re-activated to index the next group of rolls for imprinting. Therefore, in accordance with this arrangement, the cutting and imprinting are separately performed, while the imprinting is performed in batches. However, such a multi-step process can render aesthetically unpleasing stamped dough pieces. For example, the imprint may be stamped inconsistently on each dough piece, resulting in a non-uniform batch of stamped dough products. The depth of the imprint may also vary undesirably with such a two step process.
In addition, the use of a two step process where the dough product is subsequently stamped results in a slowing of the overall processing of such dough products. Thus, such a process provides a disadvantage in that it cannot be efficiently used in a high speed production line.